slowly it grimly gained slight ground, and presaged to them both the possibility of worse to come.

Only yesterday Richard Bransby had taken little Helen on his knee, and holding her sunny head close to his heart had talked to her of her mother. He often held the child so—but he rarely spoke to her of the mother—and of that mother to no one else did he ever speak. Only his own angry heart and the long hungry nights knew what she had been to him—only they and his God. God! who must be divine in pity and forgiveness towards the rebel rage of husbands so sore and so faithful.

Yesterday, too, he had told the child of how like a flower his Alice, her mother, had been, and seeing how she caught at the fancy (odd in so prosaic a man) and liked it, he had gone on to speak of his own mother, her “granny,” for all the world like a deep, very red rose, and of Violet, her aunt.

Helen wriggled her glowing head from the tender prison of his hands, looked up into his sharp, tired face, clapped her own petal-like little palms, and said with a gurgling laugh and a dancing wink of her fearless blue eyes, “And you—Daddy—are just like a flower, too!”

He shook her and called her “Miss Impudence.”

“Oh! but yes, you are. I’ll tell you, you are that tall ugly cactus that Simmons says came from Mexicur—all big prickles and one poor little lonely flower ’way up at the top by itself, grown out of the ugly leaves and the ugly thorns, and not pretty either.”

Bransby sighed, and caught her quickly closer to him again—one poor insignificant attempt of a blossom lonely, alone; solitary but for thorns, and only desirable in comparison with them, and because it was the flowering—such as it was—of a plant exotic and costly: a magenta rag of a flower that stood for much money, and for nothing else!

The baby went on with the parable—pretty as he had made it, grotesqued now by her. “An’ Aunt Carline’s anover flower, too. She’s a daleeah.”

Bransby laughed. Caroline Leavitt was rather like a dahlia; neat, geometrically regular, handsome, cut and built by rule, fashionable, prim but gorgeous, as far from poetry and sentiment as anything a flower could be.

Mrs. Leavitt was his widowed cousin and housekeeper—called “Aunt” by the children. Richard and Violet had been the only children of John and Cora Bransby.

Violet, several years younger than Richard, had married six years earlier—married a human oddity, half-genius, half-adventurer, impecunious, improvident, vain. He had misused and broken her. His death was literally the only kindness he had ever done her—and it had killed her—for weak-womanlike she had loved him to the end. Perhaps such weakness is a finer, truer strength—weighed in God’s scales—than man-called strength.

Violet Pryde, dying five years after Alice’s death, left two children; the boys playing with six-year-old Helen under the oak trees. Bransby had been blind to his sister’s needs while Pryde had lived; but indeed she had hidden them with the silence, the dignity and the deft, quiet subterfuge of such natures—but at her husband’s death Bransby had hastened to ask, as gently as he could (and to the women he loved he could be gentleness itself), “How are you off? What do you need? What would you like best? What may I do?” pressing himself to her as suitor rather than almoner. But she had refused all but friendship, indeed almost had refused it, since it had never been given her dead. Her loyalty survived Pryde’s disloyal life, and even dwarfed and stunted her mother-instinct to do her utmost for her boys: her boys and Pryde’s. But her own death had followed close upon her husband’s, and then Richard Branbsy had asserted himself. He had gathered up into his own capable hands the shabby threads of her affairs—mismanaged for years, but—even so—too scant to be tangled, and the charge of her two orphaned boys.

He had brought Stephen and Hugh at once to Deep Dale and had established them there on an almost perfect parity with Helen—a parity impinged by little else than her advantage of sex and charm and presumable heirship.

Such was—in brief—the home and the home folk of Deep Dale, the millionaire shipbuilder’s toy estate a mile or two from Oxshott.

And Helen ruled it—and them.

Caroline Leavitt housekept, but small Helen reigned. Her reign was no ephemeral sovereignty—not even a constitutional queenship; it was autocracy gracious and sunshiny, but all of autocracy for all that. Helen ruled.

CHAPTER III

Richard Bransby had amassed a fortune and perfected a fad, but he had amassed no friends. In the thirty-five years in which he had gathered and nursed his fortune (for he began at fifteen) he had made but the one friend—Latham. And even this sole friendship was largely professional and in small degree quick or vibrant.

Helen might have had twenty playmates, but she greatly cared for none but her dear “make believes,” and tolerated no others but her cavalierly treated cousins.

Mrs. Leavitt gave tea to the well-to-do of the neighborhood, and took it of them. Very occasionally she and Richard dined with them alternately as hosts and guests. But none of it ran to friendship, or shaped towards intimacy. She was too fussy a woman for friendship, he too embittered and too arrogant a man.

The vicinity of Claygate and Oxshott teemed with the stucco and ornate wood “residences” of rich stockbrokers and successful business men—living elaborately in the lovely countryside—but not of it: of London still, train-catching, market-watching, silk-hatted, bridge-playing.

Bransby rarely hatted in silk, and he preferred Dickens to bridge. He nodded to his rich fellow-villagers, but he clasped them no hand-clasp.

He, too, was in the country but not of it, he too was Londoner to the core; but both in a sense quite different from them.

Deep Dale was a beautiful excrescence—but an excrescence—an elaborate florescence of his wealth, but he had never felt it “home,” except because Alice had rather liked it, and never would feel it “home” again except as Helen and his books might grow to make it so.

There was a flat, too, in Curzon Street Alice had liked it rather more than she had Deep Dale, and while she lived he had too; except that they had been more alone, and in that much more together, at Oxshott, and for that he had always been grateful to Deep Dale, and held it, for that, in some tenderness still. And Helen had been born there.

But to him “Home” meant a dingy house in Marylebone, in which he had been born and his mother died. He avoided seeing it now (an undertaker tenanted the basement and the first floor, a dressmaker, whose clientèle was chiefly of the slenderly-pursed demimonde, the other two floors), but he still held it in his stubborn heart for “home.”

In business Bransby was hard, cold and implastic. He had great talent in the conduct of his affairs, indefatigable industry, undeviating devotion. Small wonder—or rather none—that he grew rich and steadily richer. But had he had the genius to rule kindlier, to be friend as well as master, to win, accept and use the friendship of the men he employed (and now sometimes a little crushed of their best possibility of service by the ruthlessness of his rule and by the unsympathy of his touch), his might well have grown one of the gigantic, wizard fortunes.

Even as things were, Morton Grant, head and trusted clerk, probably